The Supreme Court on April 28 seemed sympathetic to an epileptic student’s family that is suing a Minnesota school district, alleging that the school illegally denied special accommodation.
The oral argument in A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools became heated when the attorney for the district accused the other lawyers at the hearing of “lying” about the position she was arguing, an accusation she subsequently withdrew.
The U.S. solicitor general’s office argued in favor of the family’s position.
Ava has intellectual limitations and experiences seizures during the day. The most severe seizures happen in the morning, but after that “she’s alert and able to learn until about 6 p.m.” She also needs assistance with walking and toileting.
The family argued in the petition that the school district applied a stricter test to the circumstances than was required, which would make it more difficult for the family to succeed with a claim.
The family filed suit under several federal statutes, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guarantees that all children receive a “free appropriate public education.” The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act also provide protections for disabled individuals.
Before Ava’s family moved to Minnesota in 2015, her public school district in Kentucky met her needs, including home instruction late in the day. Her new school district in Minnesota, Osseo Area Schools, “refused to accommodate her,” denying evening instruction and giving “a series of shifting explanations,” the petition alleged. In the beginning, the district said it did not want to set a bad precedent and then later stated that educating at home “would be too restrictive,” while at the same time saying it needed more “data” to rationalize a “programming change,” the petition said.
In the first three years of living in Minnesota, Ava received two fewer hours of daily instruction than nondisabled students received. Ava’s parents launched an IDEA complaint with the Minnesota Department of Education. An administrative law judge held that the district violated the IDEA. The judge ruled that instead of prioritizing the child’s educational needs, the district was more concerned with maintaining “the regular hours of the school’s faculty.”
The judge directed the district to provide evening instruction.
The school district appealed to the federal district court. Around the same time, Ava’s parents sued the district under the ADA and Rehabilitation Act, asking for an injunction to “permanently secure [Ava]’s rights to a full school day,” along with compensatory damages for the mistreatment she experienced, according to the petition.
The federal district court affirmed the ruling in favor of Ava under the IDEA, finding that she needed “more than 4.25 hours of schooling a day.” The court found that “extending her instructions day until 6 p.m. and including compensatory hours of instruction” was “the appropriate remedy” under the IDEA.
However, the court ruled against Ava with regard to the ADA and Rehabilitation Act claims, reasoning that she had failed to demonstrate that the district acted either with “bad faith or gross misjudgment,” the petition said.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed.
After acknowledging that the family had produced evidence demonstrating that the Minnesota district had been “negligent or even deliberately indifferent” in denying the reasonable accommodations the Kentucky district provided for years, the panel held it was “constrained” by the circuit court’s 1982 ruling in Monahan v. Nebraska that created the bad-faith-or-gross-misjudgment standard.
In the Third and Ninth Circuits, the evidence Ava presented would have been strong enough to survive a motion to dismiss, but in the Eighth Circuit and four other circuits “embracing Monahan’s uniquely stringent standard,” it wasn’t, the petition said.
In June 2024, the full Eighth Circuit denied a request for rehearing.
“The defendant must have acted with discriminatory intent. Monahan correctly described that intent as bad faith, which is the longstanding term for actions done for an improper reason, here, disability,” the lawyer said.
In the ADA, Congress “spelled out reasonable accommodations” and “barred damages without intent for employers and altogether for hotels and hot dog stands.”
Reversing Monahan “would expose 46,000 public schools to liability when, for 40 years, they have trained teachers, allocated budgets, and obtained insurance all in reliance on Monahan,” Blatt said.
Some of the justices seemed taken aback by Blatt’s suggestion that the Supreme Court should apply a tough standard in the case, an argument they said they had not anticipated.
After Blatt said her side defines bad faith as “discriminatory intent,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that “would be a sea change” in disability discrimination lawsuits.
Blatt replied it would only be “a sea change in terms of liability.”
Barrett said, “a sea change in terms of liability is a pretty big sea change,” adding that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out during the oral argument that “no circuit has adopted your rule.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised the possibility that the district may have violated the Supreme Court’s procedural rules by not adequately explaining the nature of its argument during the court’s required briefing process in the lead-up to the oral argument.
“It would have been nice to have known that we were biting off that big a chunk,” the justice told Blatt.
Blatt said her side’s arguments had not changed.
“What is a lie and inaccurate is that we ever said in any context that this court should take the same language and define it differently depending on context. That is not true. There is no statement. They [are] adding words to our mouth,” she said.
Justice Neil Gorsuch asked Blatt to confirm that she believed the family’s attorney, Roman Martinez, and the attorney from the U.S. solicitor general’s office “are lying.”
Blatt replied, “at oral argument, yes, absolutely.”
Gorsuch told the lawyer, “I think you should be more careful with your words, Ms. Blatt.”
Blatt replied that the two other attorneys “should be more careful in … mischaracterizing a position by an experienced advocate of the Supreme Court, with all due respect.”
A few minutes later, Blatt withdrew her accusation.
Martinez said Blatt acknowledged that the district is “trying to get rid of the reasonable accommodation claims that people in this country have enjoyed for decades.”
“This is a revolutionary and radical argument that has not been made in this court and that she’s trying to get you to decide on the basis of essentially no briefing.”
Martinez said disability rights groups “would have rung a five-alarm fire” if they had realized what the district was seeking.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case by the end of June.
